Showing posts with label instruments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label instruments. Show all posts
Friday, December 21, 2012
Landfillharmonic: Paraguayan Orchestra Made Out of Trash
I feel inspired and humbled at the same time:
Thursday, March 01, 2012
The Badgermin (Stuffed Badger Theramin)
I don't even know what to say; someone took a dead badger and put a theramin in it.
and video...
and video...
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Monday, March 29, 2010
Kazookeylele: Ukele+Toy Piano+Kazoo+80s hair rock=
I have to tip my hat as 1) I couldn't even imagine an instrument like this and 2) I would never have the courage to make a video like this.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
In Search of Lost Sounds (How Modern Pianos Distort Early Creations Like "Moonlight Sonata")
In Search of Lost Sounds: Why you've never really heard the "Moonlight" Sonata.
By Jan Swafford Posted Tuesday, March 2, 2010, at 7:06 AM ET
SLATE
......
In 1976, Michael Frederick, once an East Asian history major and a harpsichord buff, and his musical wife, Patricia, bought an old piano, a British Stodart built around 1830. It needed major restoration, and because Michael had been building harpsichords as a hobby since his college days he decided to work on it himself. Then they bought another 19th-century piano, and another, and so on. You know how it is with obsessions.
At the turn of this century, their five-room house was full of keyboards, the furniture and the Fredericks themselves crammed into the interstices. Finally, their village of Ashburnham, Mass., agreed to lease them the small Victorian brick library next to the town hall to house what was now called the Frederick Historic Piano Collection. They could rent the library for a modest rate, balanced by an equal amount they invested in restoring the building. Today the pianos reside in the library, the only collection of their kind on the continent.
The Frederick Collection has 24 restored pianos, the oldest an unsigned Viennese model from the 1790s of a style Mozart knew, followed by a century's worth of legendary names: Graf, Bösendorfer, Streicher, Pleyel, Blüthner, an 1866 Steinway. The youngest member is an Erard made in Paris in 1928. They're all originals, and Michael Frederick is himself an original. If you need to know about the exigencies of postwar felt production in Europe, he'll catch you up. Felt is a big thing in his life; likewise, leather, wood, wire, and other low-tech hardware. If you e-mail the collection, you get his wife, Pat. Michael doesn't do e-mail or computers, either.
He keeps the pianos in concert-ready shape, and the couple produce a yearly series down the road in Central Church. The 200 seats are usually filled. If you make a reservation to see the collection in the library they'll give you the tour, very much hands-on. Maybe Pat will sing you a Schubert song in her tremulous voice, accompanying herself on a model that Schubert would have known well. Michael might play you Mozart on the 1790s piano, whose action is so delicate that nobody yet has had the courage to play it in public. He is ready to expound at length on any relevant subject you like and more. When I made some observation to the effect of, "the piano was in the middle of its evolution in Beethoven's lifetime," he pointed out with some heat that this wasn't the case. The state of the piano was a variety of national, local, and house traditions moving forward at the same time. During the 19th century, Viennese pianos were noted for their lightness of touch and tone and British pianos for a more robust build, touch, and sound; French pianos lay somewhere between. Within those parameters of local taste, each maker had a distinctive style and a proprietary bag of tricks. For one example, Mozart's favorite maker, Walter, would leave his soundboards outside all winter; the ones that cracked went into the stove.
When composers wrote for these instruments they sometimes loved them and sometimes chafed at their limitations, but in any case they wrote for those sounds, that touch, those bells and whistles. From old instruments, performers on modern pianos can get important insights into the sound image that Mozart, Schubert, et al., were aiming for. But music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn't just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can't even be played as written on modern pianos. One example is the double-octave glissando in the last movement of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata. With the light action and shallow key dip of a period Viennese piano you can plant your thumb and little finger on the octave and slide to the left, and there it is. Given the much heavier action and deeper key dip of a modern piano, if you tried that today you'd dislocate something. Every pianist has a dodge for that passage. It's said that before the glissando Rudolf Serkin would discreetly spit on his fingers.
The prime example of what I'm talking about is perhaps the most famous piece ever written: Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. Hector Berlioz called its murmuring, mournful first movement, "one of those poems that human language does not know how to interpret." At the beginning, Beethoven directs the performer to hold down the sustain pedal through the whole first movement, so the strings are never damped. With the pianos of Beethoven's time, on which the sustain of the strings was shorter than today, the effect was subtle, one harmony melting into another. On a modern piano, with its longer sustain, the effect of holding the pedal down would be a tonal traffic jam. Today you have to fake the effect, and it never quite works as intended.
........
Check out the original post (with sound file examples with side-by-side examples of the pianos) HERE.
By Jan Swafford Posted Tuesday, March 2, 2010, at 7:06 AM ET
SLATE
......
In 1976, Michael Frederick, once an East Asian history major and a harpsichord buff, and his musical wife, Patricia, bought an old piano, a British Stodart built around 1830. It needed major restoration, and because Michael had been building harpsichords as a hobby since his college days he decided to work on it himself. Then they bought another 19th-century piano, and another, and so on. You know how it is with obsessions.
At the turn of this century, their five-room house was full of keyboards, the furniture and the Fredericks themselves crammed into the interstices. Finally, their village of Ashburnham, Mass., agreed to lease them the small Victorian brick library next to the town hall to house what was now called the Frederick Historic Piano Collection. They could rent the library for a modest rate, balanced by an equal amount they invested in restoring the building. Today the pianos reside in the library, the only collection of their kind on the continent.
The Frederick Collection has 24 restored pianos, the oldest an unsigned Viennese model from the 1790s of a style Mozart knew, followed by a century's worth of legendary names: Graf, Bösendorfer, Streicher, Pleyel, Blüthner, an 1866 Steinway. The youngest member is an Erard made in Paris in 1928. They're all originals, and Michael Frederick is himself an original. If you need to know about the exigencies of postwar felt production in Europe, he'll catch you up. Felt is a big thing in his life; likewise, leather, wood, wire, and other low-tech hardware. If you e-mail the collection, you get his wife, Pat. Michael doesn't do e-mail or computers, either.
He keeps the pianos in concert-ready shape, and the couple produce a yearly series down the road in Central Church. The 200 seats are usually filled. If you make a reservation to see the collection in the library they'll give you the tour, very much hands-on. Maybe Pat will sing you a Schubert song in her tremulous voice, accompanying herself on a model that Schubert would have known well. Michael might play you Mozart on the 1790s piano, whose action is so delicate that nobody yet has had the courage to play it in public. He is ready to expound at length on any relevant subject you like and more. When I made some observation to the effect of, "the piano was in the middle of its evolution in Beethoven's lifetime," he pointed out with some heat that this wasn't the case. The state of the piano was a variety of national, local, and house traditions moving forward at the same time. During the 19th century, Viennese pianos were noted for their lightness of touch and tone and British pianos for a more robust build, touch, and sound; French pianos lay somewhere between. Within those parameters of local taste, each maker had a distinctive style and a proprietary bag of tricks. For one example, Mozart's favorite maker, Walter, would leave his soundboards outside all winter; the ones that cracked went into the stove.
When composers wrote for these instruments they sometimes loved them and sometimes chafed at their limitations, but in any case they wrote for those sounds, that touch, those bells and whistles. From old instruments, performers on modern pianos can get important insights into the sound image that Mozart, Schubert, et al., were aiming for. But music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn't just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can't even be played as written on modern pianos. One example is the double-octave glissando in the last movement of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata. With the light action and shallow key dip of a period Viennese piano you can plant your thumb and little finger on the octave and slide to the left, and there it is. Given the much heavier action and deeper key dip of a modern piano, if you tried that today you'd dislocate something. Every pianist has a dodge for that passage. It's said that before the glissando Rudolf Serkin would discreetly spit on his fingers.
The prime example of what I'm talking about is perhaps the most famous piece ever written: Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. Hector Berlioz called its murmuring, mournful first movement, "one of those poems that human language does not know how to interpret." At the beginning, Beethoven directs the performer to hold down the sustain pedal through the whole first movement, so the strings are never damped. With the pianos of Beethoven's time, on which the sustain of the strings was shorter than today, the effect was subtle, one harmony melting into another. On a modern piano, with its longer sustain, the effect of holding the pedal down would be a tonal traffic jam. Today you have to fake the effect, and it never quite works as intended.
........
Check out the original post (with sound file examples with side-by-side examples of the pianos) HERE.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
35,000-year-old Flute Discovered in Germany
Yahoo/AP
Professor Nicholas Conard of the University in Tuebingen shows a flute during a press conference in Tuebingen, southern Germany, on Wednesday, June 24, 2009. The thin bird-bone flute carved some 35,000 years ago and unearthed in a German cave is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archeologists say, and offers the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture. A team led by Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany. (AP Photo/Daniel Maurer)
NYT
June 25, 2009
Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.
Music and sculpture — expressions of artistic creativity, it seems — were emerging in tandem among some of the first modern humans when they began spreading through Europe or soon thereafter.
Archaeologists Wednesday reported the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represented the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves” in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.
A three-hole flute carved from mammoth ivory was uncovered a few years ago at another cave, as well as two flutes made from the wing bones of a mute swan. In the same cave, archaeologists also found beautiful carvings of animals.
But until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and were not dated precisely enough to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music. The earliest solid evidence of musical instruments previously came from France and Austria, but dated much more recently than 30,000 years ago.
In an article published online by the journal Nature, Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues wrote, “These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.”
Although radiocarbon dates earlier than 30,000 years ago can be imprecise, samples from the bones and associated material were tested independently by two laboratories, in England and Germany, using different methods. Scientists said the data agreed on ages of at least 35,000 years.
Dr. Conard, a professor of archaeology, said in an e-mail message from Germany that “the new flutes must be very close to 40,000 calendar years old and certainly date to the initial settlement of the region.”
Dr. Conard’s team said an abundance of stone and ivory artifacts, flint-knapping debris and bones of hunted animals had been found in the sediments with the flutes. Many people appeared to have lived and worked there soon after their arrival in Europe, assumed to be around 40,000 years ago and 10,000 years before the native Neanderthals became extinct.
The Neanderthals, close human relatives, apparently left no firm evidence of having been musical.
The most significant of the new artifacts, the archaeologists said, was a flute made from a hollow bone from a griffon vulture; griffon skeletons are often found in these caves. The preserved portion is about 8.5 inches long and includes the end of the instrument into which the musician blew. The maker carved two deep, V-shaped notches there, and four fine lines near the finger holes. The other end appears to have been broken off; judging by the typical length of these bird bones, two or three inches are missing.
Dr. Conard’s discovery in 2004 of the seven-inch three-hole ivory flute at the Geissenklösterle cave, also near Ulm, inspired him to widen his search of caves, saying at the time that southern Germany “may have been one of the places where human culture originated.”
Friedrich Seeberger, a German specialist in ancient music, reproduced the ivory flute in wood. Experimenting with the replica, he found that the ancient flute produced a range of notes comparable in many ways to modern flutes. “The tones are quite harmonic,” he said.
A replica has yet to be made of the recent discovery, but the archaeologists said they expected the five-hole flute with its larger diameter to “provide a comparable, or perhaps greater, range of notes and musical possibilities.”
This week, Dr. Conard began a new season of exploration at Hohle Fels Cave. “We’ll see how it goes,” he said by e-mail. “I never have expectations. One never finds what one is looking for, but one normally finds something interesting.”
Archaeologists and other scholars can only speculate as to what moved these early Europeans to make music.
It so happens that the Hohle Fels flute was uncovered in sediments a few feet away from the carved figurine of a busty, nude woman, also around 35,000 years old, noted Dr. Conard and his co-authors, Susanne C. Münzel of Tübingen and Maria Malina of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. That discovery was announced in May by Dr. Conard.
Was this evidence of happy hours after the hunt? Fertility rites or social bonding? The German archaeologists suggested that music in the Stone Age “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.”
Professor Nicholas Conard of the University in Tuebingen shows a flute during a press conference in Tuebingen, southern Germany, on Wednesday, June 24, 2009. The thin bird-bone flute carved some 35,000 years ago and unearthed in a German cave is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archeologists say, and offers the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture. A team led by Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany. (AP Photo/Daniel Maurer)
NYT
June 25, 2009
Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.
Music and sculpture — expressions of artistic creativity, it seems — were emerging in tandem among some of the first modern humans when they began spreading through Europe or soon thereafter.
Archaeologists Wednesday reported the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represented the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves” in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.
A three-hole flute carved from mammoth ivory was uncovered a few years ago at another cave, as well as two flutes made from the wing bones of a mute swan. In the same cave, archaeologists also found beautiful carvings of animals.
But until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and were not dated precisely enough to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music. The earliest solid evidence of musical instruments previously came from France and Austria, but dated much more recently than 30,000 years ago.
In an article published online by the journal Nature, Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues wrote, “These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.”
Although radiocarbon dates earlier than 30,000 years ago can be imprecise, samples from the bones and associated material were tested independently by two laboratories, in England and Germany, using different methods. Scientists said the data agreed on ages of at least 35,000 years.
Dr. Conard, a professor of archaeology, said in an e-mail message from Germany that “the new flutes must be very close to 40,000 calendar years old and certainly date to the initial settlement of the region.”
Dr. Conard’s team said an abundance of stone and ivory artifacts, flint-knapping debris and bones of hunted animals had been found in the sediments with the flutes. Many people appeared to have lived and worked there soon after their arrival in Europe, assumed to be around 40,000 years ago and 10,000 years before the native Neanderthals became extinct.
The Neanderthals, close human relatives, apparently left no firm evidence of having been musical.
The most significant of the new artifacts, the archaeologists said, was a flute made from a hollow bone from a griffon vulture; griffon skeletons are often found in these caves. The preserved portion is about 8.5 inches long and includes the end of the instrument into which the musician blew. The maker carved two deep, V-shaped notches there, and four fine lines near the finger holes. The other end appears to have been broken off; judging by the typical length of these bird bones, two or three inches are missing.
Dr. Conard’s discovery in 2004 of the seven-inch three-hole ivory flute at the Geissenklösterle cave, also near Ulm, inspired him to widen his search of caves, saying at the time that southern Germany “may have been one of the places where human culture originated.”
Friedrich Seeberger, a German specialist in ancient music, reproduced the ivory flute in wood. Experimenting with the replica, he found that the ancient flute produced a range of notes comparable in many ways to modern flutes. “The tones are quite harmonic,” he said.
A replica has yet to be made of the recent discovery, but the archaeologists said they expected the five-hole flute with its larger diameter to “provide a comparable, or perhaps greater, range of notes and musical possibilities.”
This week, Dr. Conard began a new season of exploration at Hohle Fels Cave. “We’ll see how it goes,” he said by e-mail. “I never have expectations. One never finds what one is looking for, but one normally finds something interesting.”
Archaeologists and other scholars can only speculate as to what moved these early Europeans to make music.
It so happens that the Hohle Fels flute was uncovered in sediments a few feet away from the carved figurine of a busty, nude woman, also around 35,000 years old, noted Dr. Conard and his co-authors, Susanne C. Münzel of Tübingen and Maria Malina of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. That discovery was announced in May by Dr. Conard.
Was this evidence of happy hours after the hunt? Fertility rites or social bonding? The German archaeologists suggested that music in the Stone Age “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.”
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Eddie Van Halen reinvents the guitar
CNN
Eddie Van Halen reinvents the guitar
By Denise Quan
CNN
LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- There are rock stars, and then there are Rock Stars. Eddie Van Halen is a Rock Star.
Take an incident in the summer of 2007. A security guard stopped me as I attempted to drive through the gates of Center Staging, a rehearsal studio across the street from Burbank Airport.
"That's odd," I thought. "They've never had security before. I wonder what's going on?"
Pretty soon, I discovered the reason for the limited access. A black BMW convertible drove up, and a baby-faced teenager jumped out of the driver's seat. The passenger door opened, and out walked Eddie Van Halen. Everyone stopped talking and stared, including Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, who were outside taking a break from their own rehearsal.
Van Halen and the other members of the band had just announced a big reunion tour with original singer David Lee Roth at a splashy news conference in Beverly Hills, and I had inadvertently discovered where they were prepping for their journey. Eddie and his son Wolfgang -- named for Mozart -- greeted a couple of people in the parking lot and quickly disappeared inside the soundstage.
Moments later, the earth trembled as the loudest guitar I've ever heard in my life was fired up. It was like a sonic boom -- only the sound wasn't coming from the airport. It was coming from inside the soundstage. The legendary guitarist launched into the familiar intro to Van Halen's 1978 hit, "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love." That was followed by "Runnin' With the Devil."
Joss Stone ran out of her own rehearsal studio -- barefoot -- and begged a security guard for entry. She was turned away.
Months later, I would catch Van Halen, the band, during their triumphant hometown concert in Los Angeles. Little did I know that during that tour, Eddie had been road-testing a series of prototype guitars he was designing with Fender. The instrument was called "the Wolfgang," after his son, who's Van Halen's current bass player. VideoWatch Van Halen show off his new axe »
After years of wearing down metal frets and having pieces of his guitar rip off or malfunction during shows, Van Halen says he's built a guitar that even he can't destroy. On the Wolfgang, frets are fashioned of stainless steel, and metal gadgets are custom-made by a company that specializes in medical tools. Sections of wood are left unpainted so the instrument can breathe and age -- "like a Stradivarius," the 54-year-old musician explains with a degree of pride.
We recently caught up with Eddie at his 5150 Studio, high in the hills above Los Angeles. It's where the album "1984" was recorded, along with every subsequent Van Halen record. The studio sits on seven acres, just a stone's throw from the Tudor mansion he bought in 1980. He and his fiancee/publicist, Janie Liszewski, scoot around the property in golf carts. The red, white and black-striped motif of his signature Van Halen guitar is painted on the walkway. The following is an edited version of the interview.
CNN: You've been tearing guitars apart and redesigning them all your life, haven't you?
Eddie Van Halen: It kind of started when I went to a Radio Shack-type of store in Pasadena. They had a 12-string guitar hanging there, and I didn't want 12 -- I wanted six. And so I asked the guy, "Could I take six strings off and try it?" And the guy said, "No, not unless you buy it." So I borrowed the money from my parents, bought it, took six strings off and voila -- did what I wanted. The guitar -- it's on the first album cover. It's called Frankenstein.
I'm always tinkering with stuff. And basically, the new Wolfgang is a combination of all the years of tearing things apart, ruining things, creating things and coming up with things that I later found out I could patent.
CNN: How many guitars have you accidentally broken on stage?
Van Halen: On stage? (He shrugs.) During the last show, I actually tried to break a Wolfgang, and it wouldn't break. I picked it up and I couldn't break the damn thing. I threw it up in the air, and later put it out in the rain. I picked it up half an hour later, and it was still in tune. It pissed me off.
CNN: The Wolfgang sells for about $3,000. Are you worried about introducing a high-end guitar when the economy is taking such a hit?
Van Halen: I just don't think that way. I'm really not a businessman, so to speak. The only reason I do it is because people are always asking me where they can get what I use.
CNN: Who are some of the musicians who have asked?
Van Halen: Everybody uses my stuff. They just don't like talking about it.
CNN: I'm told you can hear things that most people can't with the naked ear.
Van Halen: I have selective hearing. (Laughs)
CNN: I think a lot of men do!
Van Halen: Obviously, I've lost a little bit, at very high frequencies -- which is kind of like a woman screaming at ya.
CNN: "Ed, did you take the trash out?" "Can you wipe the dishes?" Are you hearing anything?
Van Halen: What was that? (Laughs) I don't know. I'm blessed with a good pair of ears. That's how I fooled my piano teacher. I'd watch his fingers and I'd listen to it, and I just kind of basically learned it by myself.
I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize -- out of like 5,000 kids! The judges were like, "Very interesting interpretation!" I thought I was playing it right.
But everything is open to interpretation. Imagine if Beethoven had a tape recorder. Then you'd know exactly what he meant. Maybe he meant (singing the opening notes to the Fifth Symphony), "Da da da da" instead of "Boom boom boom boom!" Who knows.
CNN: Did you ever take formal guitar lessons?
Van Halen: No. That's why I do all this crazy stuff. It's not taught.
CNN: Do you think you'd approach music differently if you had taken guitar lessons?
Van Halen: Probably. But you only have 12 notes. Do what you want with them.
CNN: What kind of music do you listen to when you're at home?
Van Halen: I don't listen to anything, really. Believe it or not, I'm so slammed with ideas, and the man upstairs overloads me with stuff, so I'm always doing my own thing.
CNN: How was it having Wolfie on the road with you on the last tour? He was 16 when he took over as Van Halen's bass player in 2007.
Van Halen: It was a dream! That kid is truly amazing. I did name him after the right guy. (Laughs)
CNN: He's still in high school. Did he have a tutor on the road?
Van Halen: Yeah, he had four hours of school and then a gig at night. He worked three times harder than any of us.
CNN: How was it touring with David Lee Roth after all these years?
Van Halen: It was great.
CNN: No smackdowns?
Van Halen: No, no. Everything went great. It went smooth.
CNN: Is there going to be another Van Halen tour?
Van Halen: Oh, I know so. I mean, we're a band! That wasn't just a one-off thing. It's officially a band. And Wolfgang Van Halen is the bass player. Janie and I are getting married in June, and my son's going to graduate, and we'll pick it up after that. Obviously, I hope we record some new stuff. I'm writing, and just doing the same thing I always do.
CNN: Is Wolfie going to be in the wedding?
Van Halen: He's going to be my best man. My brother's marrying us.
CNN: Oh, that's right! Alex (the drummer in Van Halen) is an ordained minister.
Van Halen: Yeah. Reverend Al! (Laughs) We're going to do it right here in the backyard. Small, intimate wedding. ... We'll get a string quartet for part of it and a DJ for afterwards, although I'm not much of a dancer.
CNN: Sounds like a very traditional, non-rock star-type of wedding. So many people can pick out an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, but not a lot of people know who you are as a human being.
Van Halen: I just consider myself slightly left-of-center. I'm not your average bear. I -- what's the word? I'm not -- normal. (Laughs) I sound like Michael Jackson. I'm not like other guys.
CNN: You hate interviews, don't you?
Van Halen: Well, believe it or not, I really don't have much to say -- 'cause the equipment speaks for itself. And so does the music.
CNN: If I play your new Wolfgang guitar, will I sound like you?
Van Halen: Why would you want to sound like anyone else? Get your own guitar. They're available!
Eddie Van Halen reinvents the guitar
By Denise Quan
CNN
LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- There are rock stars, and then there are Rock Stars. Eddie Van Halen is a Rock Star.
Take an incident in the summer of 2007. A security guard stopped me as I attempted to drive through the gates of Center Staging, a rehearsal studio across the street from Burbank Airport.
"That's odd," I thought. "They've never had security before. I wonder what's going on?"
Pretty soon, I discovered the reason for the limited access. A black BMW convertible drove up, and a baby-faced teenager jumped out of the driver's seat. The passenger door opened, and out walked Eddie Van Halen. Everyone stopped talking and stared, including Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals, who were outside taking a break from their own rehearsal.
Van Halen and the other members of the band had just announced a big reunion tour with original singer David Lee Roth at a splashy news conference in Beverly Hills, and I had inadvertently discovered where they were prepping for their journey. Eddie and his son Wolfgang -- named for Mozart -- greeted a couple of people in the parking lot and quickly disappeared inside the soundstage.
Moments later, the earth trembled as the loudest guitar I've ever heard in my life was fired up. It was like a sonic boom -- only the sound wasn't coming from the airport. It was coming from inside the soundstage. The legendary guitarist launched into the familiar intro to Van Halen's 1978 hit, "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love." That was followed by "Runnin' With the Devil."
Joss Stone ran out of her own rehearsal studio -- barefoot -- and begged a security guard for entry. She was turned away.
Months later, I would catch Van Halen, the band, during their triumphant hometown concert in Los Angeles. Little did I know that during that tour, Eddie had been road-testing a series of prototype guitars he was designing with Fender. The instrument was called "the Wolfgang," after his son, who's Van Halen's current bass player. VideoWatch Van Halen show off his new axe »
After years of wearing down metal frets and having pieces of his guitar rip off or malfunction during shows, Van Halen says he's built a guitar that even he can't destroy. On the Wolfgang, frets are fashioned of stainless steel, and metal gadgets are custom-made by a company that specializes in medical tools. Sections of wood are left unpainted so the instrument can breathe and age -- "like a Stradivarius," the 54-year-old musician explains with a degree of pride.
We recently caught up with Eddie at his 5150 Studio, high in the hills above Los Angeles. It's where the album "1984" was recorded, along with every subsequent Van Halen record. The studio sits on seven acres, just a stone's throw from the Tudor mansion he bought in 1980. He and his fiancee/publicist, Janie Liszewski, scoot around the property in golf carts. The red, white and black-striped motif of his signature Van Halen guitar is painted on the walkway. The following is an edited version of the interview.
CNN: You've been tearing guitars apart and redesigning them all your life, haven't you?
Eddie Van Halen: It kind of started when I went to a Radio Shack-type of store in Pasadena. They had a 12-string guitar hanging there, and I didn't want 12 -- I wanted six. And so I asked the guy, "Could I take six strings off and try it?" And the guy said, "No, not unless you buy it." So I borrowed the money from my parents, bought it, took six strings off and voila -- did what I wanted. The guitar -- it's on the first album cover. It's called Frankenstein.
I'm always tinkering with stuff. And basically, the new Wolfgang is a combination of all the years of tearing things apart, ruining things, creating things and coming up with things that I later found out I could patent.
CNN: How many guitars have you accidentally broken on stage?
Van Halen: On stage? (He shrugs.) During the last show, I actually tried to break a Wolfgang, and it wouldn't break. I picked it up and I couldn't break the damn thing. I threw it up in the air, and later put it out in the rain. I picked it up half an hour later, and it was still in tune. It pissed me off.
CNN: The Wolfgang sells for about $3,000. Are you worried about introducing a high-end guitar when the economy is taking such a hit?
Van Halen: I just don't think that way. I'm really not a businessman, so to speak. The only reason I do it is because people are always asking me where they can get what I use.
CNN: Who are some of the musicians who have asked?
Van Halen: Everybody uses my stuff. They just don't like talking about it.
CNN: I'm told you can hear things that most people can't with the naked ear.
Van Halen: I have selective hearing. (Laughs)
CNN: I think a lot of men do!
Van Halen: Obviously, I've lost a little bit, at very high frequencies -- which is kind of like a woman screaming at ya.
CNN: "Ed, did you take the trash out?" "Can you wipe the dishes?" Are you hearing anything?
Van Halen: What was that? (Laughs) I don't know. I'm blessed with a good pair of ears. That's how I fooled my piano teacher. I'd watch his fingers and I'd listen to it, and I just kind of basically learned it by myself.
I can't read music. Instead, I'd do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize -- out of like 5,000 kids! The judges were like, "Very interesting interpretation!" I thought I was playing it right.
But everything is open to interpretation. Imagine if Beethoven had a tape recorder. Then you'd know exactly what he meant. Maybe he meant (singing the opening notes to the Fifth Symphony), "Da da da da" instead of "Boom boom boom boom!" Who knows.
CNN: Did you ever take formal guitar lessons?
Van Halen: No. That's why I do all this crazy stuff. It's not taught.
CNN: Do you think you'd approach music differently if you had taken guitar lessons?
Van Halen: Probably. But you only have 12 notes. Do what you want with them.
CNN: What kind of music do you listen to when you're at home?
Van Halen: I don't listen to anything, really. Believe it or not, I'm so slammed with ideas, and the man upstairs overloads me with stuff, so I'm always doing my own thing.
CNN: How was it having Wolfie on the road with you on the last tour? He was 16 when he took over as Van Halen's bass player in 2007.
Van Halen: It was a dream! That kid is truly amazing. I did name him after the right guy. (Laughs)
CNN: He's still in high school. Did he have a tutor on the road?
Van Halen: Yeah, he had four hours of school and then a gig at night. He worked three times harder than any of us.
CNN: How was it touring with David Lee Roth after all these years?
Van Halen: It was great.
CNN: No smackdowns?
Van Halen: No, no. Everything went great. It went smooth.
CNN: Is there going to be another Van Halen tour?
Van Halen: Oh, I know so. I mean, we're a band! That wasn't just a one-off thing. It's officially a band. And Wolfgang Van Halen is the bass player. Janie and I are getting married in June, and my son's going to graduate, and we'll pick it up after that. Obviously, I hope we record some new stuff. I'm writing, and just doing the same thing I always do.
CNN: Is Wolfie going to be in the wedding?
Van Halen: He's going to be my best man. My brother's marrying us.
CNN: Oh, that's right! Alex (the drummer in Van Halen) is an ordained minister.
Van Halen: Yeah. Reverend Al! (Laughs) We're going to do it right here in the backyard. Small, intimate wedding. ... We'll get a string quartet for part of it and a DJ for afterwards, although I'm not much of a dancer.
CNN: Sounds like a very traditional, non-rock star-type of wedding. So many people can pick out an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo, but not a lot of people know who you are as a human being.
Van Halen: I just consider myself slightly left-of-center. I'm not your average bear. I -- what's the word? I'm not -- normal. (Laughs) I sound like Michael Jackson. I'm not like other guys.
CNN: You hate interviews, don't you?
Van Halen: Well, believe it or not, I really don't have much to say -- 'cause the equipment speaks for itself. And so does the music.
CNN: If I play your new Wolfgang guitar, will I sound like you?
Van Halen: Why would you want to sound like anyone else? Get your own guitar. They're available!
Sunday, October 05, 2008
NPR: Strange Musical Instruments
NPR has a story about listeners' unusually musical instruments HERE.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
MacArthur "Genius Award" Winner Walter Kitundu
He is an amazing instrument maker, composer, turntablist, and sculptor. Here is a sample of his work: the phonokora, a hybrid of a West Africa kora, a turntable, and electronics (congrats to him!):
More:
More:
Friday, September 19, 2008
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
The French Horn, That Wild Card of the Orchestra
NYT
August 13, 2008
The French Horn, That Wild Card of the Orchestra
By ALLAN KOZINN
Orchestral instruments don’t come more treacherous than the French horn, either for the musicians who play it, or, when the going gets rough, for the listeners who find themselves within earshot. Sometimes you wonder how the instrument found its way from the hunting lodge to the orchestra.
At the Mostly Mozart Festival in recent weeks, the intractable early version of the horn has made its way into the Rose Theater as a series of period-instrument bands from Germany, England and Italy performed music ranging from Italian Baroque choral works to Mozart opera. When these groups were at their best, a listener whose fondness for period instruments dates to the 1960s could reflect on how far the performance standard has risen since.
In those days period ensembles that sounded vigorous on disc often proved anemic in concert, and the instruments’ antique technology was regularly blamed for mediocre performances. Nowadays, the performances are more typically extroverted and expressive, and although period instruments, by definition, have not been modernized to make them easier to play, listeners are no longer asked to consider their difficulty when a performance goes awry.
Except, that is, when the horn notes crack and slither. The horn remains the wild card in period-instrument orchestras, and in modern ones too. And if you find yourself cringing when horn players falter badly — as I did on Aug. 5, when Concerto Italiano played three Vivaldi concertos with prominent horn parts — caveats about the instrument’s intransigence come quickly to mind.
It’s worth understanding the challenges hornists face. In its 17th- and 18th-century form, the horn is basically just a long, flared pipe wound into two or three coils, with a mouthpiece on the end. What it lacks, compared with today’s horn, is the valve mechanism: the complex tubing and finger keys at the center of a modern horn that let hornists play chromatically and in different keys.
Without recourse to valves, hornists are most at home in the relatively few notes in the overtone series that come naturally to a bit of coiled metal: mainly, the notes you hear in hunting and military calls. As the music grows more complex, the technical demands escalate. One resource hornists have is hand-stopping: by putting a hand inside the instrument’s bell, they can flatten the pitch to produce chromatic notes.
When everything goes right, hornists can work miracles. You need only have heard James Sommerville, the Boston Symphony’s principal hornist, play Elliott Carter’s Horn Concerto at Tanglewood a few weeks ago to know how chromatic (and lyrical) a horn line can be. But you can see the potential for pitch problems. And a bit of condensation from a player’s breath adhering to the inside of a coil can lead to cracked notes, or “clams.”
As is often the case, when Concerto Italiano’s hornists were good, they were great. Their sound had a fascinatingly gritty texture, much closer to the horn’s hunting-party origins than to the mellow, warm sound of a modern instrument. But when they were off — oh, dear, what a mess!
Strangely, some believe that period horn playing is meant to sound thus. When I was in music school, I had a job in a record store and would sometimes stay after hours to listen to new releases. One was a period-instrument recording of Handel’s “Water Music” on which the horns were consistently flat. When I crinkled my nose, the store’s manager said, dismissively:
“Oh, you don’t understand. It’s only because of showoffs like Don Smithers” — a brilliant Baroque trumpeter who was also my music history teacher at the time — “that people think these instruments can be played in tune. But they aren’t meant to be.”
I didn’t buy that argument then, and having heard many superb Baroque hornists, I find it less tenable now.
For some reason — maybe it’s a little-documented, mouth-drying effect of global warming — the last season was particularly rough for hornists. In a concert of Brahms and Schumann works at the 92nd Street Y in December, the usually reliable David Jolley became ensnared in every tangle a hornist can encounter (or create), including serious balance issues in ensemble pieces. And visiting orchestras seemed more prone than usual to horn flaws.
But surely the most catastrophic horn performance of the season — of many seasons, for that matter — was at the New York Philharmonic in March, when Alan Gilbert, conducting his first concert with the orchestra since having been appointed its next music director, opened his program with Haydn’s Symphony No. 48, a work with two prominent and perilous horn parts.
The Philharmonic has long been action central for horn troubles; its principal player, Philip Myers, is wildly inconsistent, and the rest of the section is also accident-prone. Much of the time Mr. Myers’s playing is squarely on pitch, shapely and warm, and when it is, it’s everything you want in a French horn line. But he cracks, misses or slides into pitches often enough that when the Philharmonic plays a work with a prominent horn line, you brace yourself and wonder if he’ll make it.
The Haydn symphony was a real clambake.
Mentioning hornists’ failings in reviews invariably brings plenty of e-mail messages, often from people who did not hear the performances but feel moved to defend a player’s reputation. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of these correspondents have variations on the word horn (“corno” or “horncall,” for example) in their e-mail addresses, and they usually identify themselves as hornists, as if their addresses didn’t make that clear.
In the case of the Haydn, some offered amazing conspiracy theories. The most interesting was that Mr. Gilbert had programmed the work knowing that it would be botched, so that he would later have reason to replace Mr. Myers. (Mr. Gilbert doesn’t seem that Machiavellian.) Another blamed the orchestra’s management for allowing Mr. Gilbert to program it.
Still others offered technical excuses: that the work requires a variety of horn that Mr. Myers doesn’t play, for instance. (That an orchestra’s programming is announced months in advance — ample time to deal with such technical problems or lobby to have the work replaced — seems not to have troubled anyone.)
Of about a dozen e-mail messages, all but one correspondent found someone other than the players to blame for the performance. A few blamed me: I am supposedly a raging cornophobe with some deep-seated resentment of horns and hornists.
To the contrary. I played the horn briefly as a teenager, somewhere between the violin and the trombone (which had a nicer bite), and I gave up brass instruments only when I realized that continuing would mean spending weekends marching around at football games in a dopey band uniform. It was the late 1960s; that kind of thing just wasn’t done.
Nearly a decade later, as a composition student, I revisited the instrument and what it could (ideally) do when I wrote an unaccompanied horn piece and a quartet for horn, violin, bassoon and percussion (what was I thinking?) for a hornist friend.
I like the horn, honest. And I know how difficult it is to get a good, centered, well-tuned sound out of it.
But here’s the thing about musical performance: It’s all difficult. It’s meant to be. Composers write, and have always written, music that pushes the limits of technique. And if you’re onstage in a professional capacity, you’re expected to be able to negotiate it. That’s the least audiences expect, and it’s a precondition for what they buy tickets for: to be moved by an interpretation; to savor its nuances and to hear something revelatory, whether the work is new or familiar.
If, instead, they end up wincing at mistuned notes and reminding themselves how tough the instruments are, they’ve been pushed out of the zone. And at that point, no amount of rationalization will make the performance anything but a sow’s ear.
August 13, 2008
The French Horn, That Wild Card of the Orchestra
By ALLAN KOZINN
Orchestral instruments don’t come more treacherous than the French horn, either for the musicians who play it, or, when the going gets rough, for the listeners who find themselves within earshot. Sometimes you wonder how the instrument found its way from the hunting lodge to the orchestra.
At the Mostly Mozart Festival in recent weeks, the intractable early version of the horn has made its way into the Rose Theater as a series of period-instrument bands from Germany, England and Italy performed music ranging from Italian Baroque choral works to Mozart opera. When these groups were at their best, a listener whose fondness for period instruments dates to the 1960s could reflect on how far the performance standard has risen since.
In those days period ensembles that sounded vigorous on disc often proved anemic in concert, and the instruments’ antique technology was regularly blamed for mediocre performances. Nowadays, the performances are more typically extroverted and expressive, and although period instruments, by definition, have not been modernized to make them easier to play, listeners are no longer asked to consider their difficulty when a performance goes awry.
Except, that is, when the horn notes crack and slither. The horn remains the wild card in period-instrument orchestras, and in modern ones too. And if you find yourself cringing when horn players falter badly — as I did on Aug. 5, when Concerto Italiano played three Vivaldi concertos with prominent horn parts — caveats about the instrument’s intransigence come quickly to mind.
It’s worth understanding the challenges hornists face. In its 17th- and 18th-century form, the horn is basically just a long, flared pipe wound into two or three coils, with a mouthpiece on the end. What it lacks, compared with today’s horn, is the valve mechanism: the complex tubing and finger keys at the center of a modern horn that let hornists play chromatically and in different keys.
Without recourse to valves, hornists are most at home in the relatively few notes in the overtone series that come naturally to a bit of coiled metal: mainly, the notes you hear in hunting and military calls. As the music grows more complex, the technical demands escalate. One resource hornists have is hand-stopping: by putting a hand inside the instrument’s bell, they can flatten the pitch to produce chromatic notes.
When everything goes right, hornists can work miracles. You need only have heard James Sommerville, the Boston Symphony’s principal hornist, play Elliott Carter’s Horn Concerto at Tanglewood a few weeks ago to know how chromatic (and lyrical) a horn line can be. But you can see the potential for pitch problems. And a bit of condensation from a player’s breath adhering to the inside of a coil can lead to cracked notes, or “clams.”
As is often the case, when Concerto Italiano’s hornists were good, they were great. Their sound had a fascinatingly gritty texture, much closer to the horn’s hunting-party origins than to the mellow, warm sound of a modern instrument. But when they were off — oh, dear, what a mess!
Strangely, some believe that period horn playing is meant to sound thus. When I was in music school, I had a job in a record store and would sometimes stay after hours to listen to new releases. One was a period-instrument recording of Handel’s “Water Music” on which the horns were consistently flat. When I crinkled my nose, the store’s manager said, dismissively:
“Oh, you don’t understand. It’s only because of showoffs like Don Smithers” — a brilliant Baroque trumpeter who was also my music history teacher at the time — “that people think these instruments can be played in tune. But they aren’t meant to be.”
I didn’t buy that argument then, and having heard many superb Baroque hornists, I find it less tenable now.
For some reason — maybe it’s a little-documented, mouth-drying effect of global warming — the last season was particularly rough for hornists. In a concert of Brahms and Schumann works at the 92nd Street Y in December, the usually reliable David Jolley became ensnared in every tangle a hornist can encounter (or create), including serious balance issues in ensemble pieces. And visiting orchestras seemed more prone than usual to horn flaws.
But surely the most catastrophic horn performance of the season — of many seasons, for that matter — was at the New York Philharmonic in March, when Alan Gilbert, conducting his first concert with the orchestra since having been appointed its next music director, opened his program with Haydn’s Symphony No. 48, a work with two prominent and perilous horn parts.
The Philharmonic has long been action central for horn troubles; its principal player, Philip Myers, is wildly inconsistent, and the rest of the section is also accident-prone. Much of the time Mr. Myers’s playing is squarely on pitch, shapely and warm, and when it is, it’s everything you want in a French horn line. But he cracks, misses or slides into pitches often enough that when the Philharmonic plays a work with a prominent horn line, you brace yourself and wonder if he’ll make it.
The Haydn symphony was a real clambake.
Mentioning hornists’ failings in reviews invariably brings plenty of e-mail messages, often from people who did not hear the performances but feel moved to defend a player’s reputation. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of these correspondents have variations on the word horn (“corno” or “horncall,” for example) in their e-mail addresses, and they usually identify themselves as hornists, as if their addresses didn’t make that clear.
In the case of the Haydn, some offered amazing conspiracy theories. The most interesting was that Mr. Gilbert had programmed the work knowing that it would be botched, so that he would later have reason to replace Mr. Myers. (Mr. Gilbert doesn’t seem that Machiavellian.) Another blamed the orchestra’s management for allowing Mr. Gilbert to program it.
Still others offered technical excuses: that the work requires a variety of horn that Mr. Myers doesn’t play, for instance. (That an orchestra’s programming is announced months in advance — ample time to deal with such technical problems or lobby to have the work replaced — seems not to have troubled anyone.)
Of about a dozen e-mail messages, all but one correspondent found someone other than the players to blame for the performance. A few blamed me: I am supposedly a raging cornophobe with some deep-seated resentment of horns and hornists.
To the contrary. I played the horn briefly as a teenager, somewhere between the violin and the trombone (which had a nicer bite), and I gave up brass instruments only when I realized that continuing would mean spending weekends marching around at football games in a dopey band uniform. It was the late 1960s; that kind of thing just wasn’t done.
Nearly a decade later, as a composition student, I revisited the instrument and what it could (ideally) do when I wrote an unaccompanied horn piece and a quartet for horn, violin, bassoon and percussion (what was I thinking?) for a hornist friend.
I like the horn, honest. And I know how difficult it is to get a good, centered, well-tuned sound out of it.
But here’s the thing about musical performance: It’s all difficult. It’s meant to be. Composers write, and have always written, music that pushes the limits of technique. And if you’re onstage in a professional capacity, you’re expected to be able to negotiate it. That’s the least audiences expect, and it’s a precondition for what they buy tickets for: to be moved by an interpretation; to savor its nuances and to hear something revelatory, whether the work is new or familiar.
If, instead, they end up wincing at mistuned notes and reminding themselves how tough the instruments are, they’ve been pushed out of the zone. And at that point, no amount of rationalization will make the performance anything but a sow’s ear.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Music Controllers: Turning Guitar Heroes Into Composers
A neat little article on unique instrument/controllers in the New York Times:
July 10, 2008
Basics
Turning Guitar Heroes Into Composers
By JASON TURBOW
FIRST came the theremin.
In 1919, Leon Theremin, an electronics wizard who had migrated from the Soviet Union, created one of the simplest musical instruments in existence, all of two metal rods protruding from a base. It did not have to be touched to elicit positively ethereal sounds — spaceship noises invented before anyone knew what a spaceship was.
Its sound — a cross between human voices and violins — is created by the musician’s hands’ disturbing electrical fields that surround the dual antennas — one for frequency, the other volume. Because it is played with precise hand movements through the air, the theremin is notoriously difficult to master.
Nearly a hundred years later, theremins are still on the scene, with updated models and kits manufactured by established synthesizer outlets like Moog and PAiA. They range from less than $100 to more than $1,000. And just as Theremin did in his studio, modern electronic whizzes continue to create clever electronic instruments for the musically inclined gadget freak to play at home — with considerably more ease than Theremin’s device.
The new breed ranges from the laser harp — arrayed beams of light that, when broken by a player’s hand, signal programmed MIDI processors — which was used in concert by the French instrumentalist Jean Michel Jarre, to the Beamz Music Performance System, more novelty than serious instrument, found in Skymall and Sharper Image catalogs for about $600.
These electronica are the modern manifestations of musical progress: Jetsons-like technology combined with utterly simplistic interfaces in which the work has been loaded, beats and samples arranged, ready for someone to wave his finger through a beam of light. (“The Beamz lets music lovers be musicians,” shouts the Sharper Image catalog.)
The popularity of Guitar Hero, the video game in which participants compete by playing a guitar-shaped controller along with the music on a screen, may also popularize new instruments to a wider audience. “Guitar Hero’s combination of an alternative controller, an alternative music notation and an interactive pedagogy has doubled the number of instrumental music makers in the U.S.A. in just two years,” said James Plamondon, chief executive of Thumtronics, maker of a keyboardlike device called the Thummer.
Take the Buchla Lightning II ($1,995), which relies on infrared light to read the spatial coordinates of a pair of wireless wands that can be waved by the user as if conducting a symphony. Triangulating and mapping as it computes velocity and acceleration, the Lightning registers the wands’ every position to generate arranged notes and samples. This is the road, it seems, to the melding of music and dance, something until now strictly the realm of tap shoes.
Modern musical development is not all about no-touch technology, however. The Haken Continuum Fingerboard ($3,390 to $5,290), the Doepfer R2M Midi Ribbon Controller ($299) and the Persephone from Monster Synths ($1,499 to $1,699) have pushed the one-touch idea, each featuring a long rectangular pad or ribbon that is manipulated by running a finger across its surface.
It is easy, of course, to turn the idea of simplistic modern instrumentation on its ear — after all, technology inherently lends itself to complexity, not simplicity. If the artistry of the laser harp lies more in its programming than its manipulation, Aaron Andrew Hunt set out to create the opposite effect — and ended up with the Tonal Plexus (www.h-pi.com).
Mr. Hunt, a pipe organ technician-turned-instructor of music theory and composition at Eastern Illinois University, was frustrated by the mainstream musical mandate that 12 pitches in an octave — a standard piano keyboard — are all one needs to make music. His solution was add more pitches. A lot more.
His resulting keyboard is to standard 88-key pianos what Yankee Stadium is to a Little League park; they serve similar purposes, but on completely different scales. Mr. Hunt raised his pitch count to 211 from 12, each individually controlled, with a line of keyboards ranging in size from two octaves to eight. (That is a high end of 1,688 keys, for those scoring at home.)
The arrangement of the keys on the Tonal Plexus — buttons, really — looks like a series of Legos laid side by side in staggered columns to play sharps, double sharps, triple sharps and the corresponding flats, 17 in all (plus six enharmonic keys an octave).
But it turns out that mastering 1,688 keys is not 20 times more difficult than mastering the standard 88. Mr. Hunt created a layout in which the relationship between chords and scales is consistent, no matter which key one starts from; the fingering for a chord in C major, for example, can be transferred to any other major chord.
“It’s based on research over the past century in psychoacoustics, or human pitch perception,” Mr. Hunt said. “Our ability to perceive pitch is much finer than our sense of touch or sight. It’s the finest human sensory discrimination.”
The concept of the moving chord, however, is not unique to the Tonal Plexus. Other devices that use it include the Thummer (not yet in commercial production), which, approaching the concept on a much smaller scale, has 57 keys on each half of a split-plane model and can be hand-held.
Somewhat larger are C-Thru Music’s AXiS-64 and Opal, each of which has 192 keys. Cortex Design, at www.cortex-design.com, has the Terpstra Keyboard, which is not commercially available, with 280 keys.
Bigger yet, the Chromatone CT-312 has 312 keys and resembles an unmarked typewriter. One of the truly jumbo devices in the category is the 810-key Wilson 990 Generalized Keyboard — like Mr. Hunt’s creation, it is microtonal — from Starr Labs in San Diego.
Starr Labs, at www.starrlabs.com, is also noteworthy for another of its creations, the 288-key ZBoard ($3,000), with a 12-by-24 key arrangement that looks more than anything like an array of black and white dominoes. Like the other boards, it has chord and scale shapes that are transferable to any note in the spectrum; one of the program options creates the equivalent of a double guitar neck running across the 12-deep keys, with each key down the scale serving as the equivalent of a fret.
“It’s like playing a lap steel guitar,” said Harvey Starr, president of Starr Labs. “The main difference is that on a guitar, you can only play one note at a time per string. On this keyboard, you can depress as many buttons down the ‘string’ as you can reach.”
C-Thru produces versions of its boards for $1,700, available through its Web site, www.c-thru-music.com. It calls the keyboard a “harmonic table,” and the honeycomb (or hexagonal lattice) pattern of keys allows for surprising simplicity.
Major chords are simply triangle patterns that point to the right (any two stacked keys plus the key to the right between them, which can be played with a single finger pressing down at their intersection), while minor chords are triangle patterns that point to the left. Each note has the same relationship to its keyboard neighbors as every other note.
“If you find music theory difficult to understand or you want to think of a different way to approach composition of music, it completely takes you away from how you’re used to playing and understanding,” said Jacqueline Kandalaft, C-Thru’s director. “It lays everything out in a very logical fashion.”
And when it comes to producing ethereal sounds, logic is sweet music.
July 10, 2008
Basics
Turning Guitar Heroes Into Composers
By JASON TURBOW
FIRST came the theremin.
In 1919, Leon Theremin, an electronics wizard who had migrated from the Soviet Union, created one of the simplest musical instruments in existence, all of two metal rods protruding from a base. It did not have to be touched to elicit positively ethereal sounds — spaceship noises invented before anyone knew what a spaceship was.
Its sound — a cross between human voices and violins — is created by the musician’s hands’ disturbing electrical fields that surround the dual antennas — one for frequency, the other volume. Because it is played with precise hand movements through the air, the theremin is notoriously difficult to master.
Nearly a hundred years later, theremins are still on the scene, with updated models and kits manufactured by established synthesizer outlets like Moog and PAiA. They range from less than $100 to more than $1,000. And just as Theremin did in his studio, modern electronic whizzes continue to create clever electronic instruments for the musically inclined gadget freak to play at home — with considerably more ease than Theremin’s device.
The new breed ranges from the laser harp — arrayed beams of light that, when broken by a player’s hand, signal programmed MIDI processors — which was used in concert by the French instrumentalist Jean Michel Jarre, to the Beamz Music Performance System, more novelty than serious instrument, found in Skymall and Sharper Image catalogs for about $600.
These electronica are the modern manifestations of musical progress: Jetsons-like technology combined with utterly simplistic interfaces in which the work has been loaded, beats and samples arranged, ready for someone to wave his finger through a beam of light. (“The Beamz lets music lovers be musicians,” shouts the Sharper Image catalog.)
The popularity of Guitar Hero, the video game in which participants compete by playing a guitar-shaped controller along with the music on a screen, may also popularize new instruments to a wider audience. “Guitar Hero’s combination of an alternative controller, an alternative music notation and an interactive pedagogy has doubled the number of instrumental music makers in the U.S.A. in just two years,” said James Plamondon, chief executive of Thumtronics, maker of a keyboardlike device called the Thummer.
Take the Buchla Lightning II ($1,995), which relies on infrared light to read the spatial coordinates of a pair of wireless wands that can be waved by the user as if conducting a symphony. Triangulating and mapping as it computes velocity and acceleration, the Lightning registers the wands’ every position to generate arranged notes and samples. This is the road, it seems, to the melding of music and dance, something until now strictly the realm of tap shoes.
Modern musical development is not all about no-touch technology, however. The Haken Continuum Fingerboard ($3,390 to $5,290), the Doepfer R2M Midi Ribbon Controller ($299) and the Persephone from Monster Synths ($1,499 to $1,699) have pushed the one-touch idea, each featuring a long rectangular pad or ribbon that is manipulated by running a finger across its surface.
It is easy, of course, to turn the idea of simplistic modern instrumentation on its ear — after all, technology inherently lends itself to complexity, not simplicity. If the artistry of the laser harp lies more in its programming than its manipulation, Aaron Andrew Hunt set out to create the opposite effect — and ended up with the Tonal Plexus (www.h-pi.com).
Mr. Hunt, a pipe organ technician-turned-instructor of music theory and composition at Eastern Illinois University, was frustrated by the mainstream musical mandate that 12 pitches in an octave — a standard piano keyboard — are all one needs to make music. His solution was add more pitches. A lot more.
His resulting keyboard is to standard 88-key pianos what Yankee Stadium is to a Little League park; they serve similar purposes, but on completely different scales. Mr. Hunt raised his pitch count to 211 from 12, each individually controlled, with a line of keyboards ranging in size from two octaves to eight. (That is a high end of 1,688 keys, for those scoring at home.)
The arrangement of the keys on the Tonal Plexus — buttons, really — looks like a series of Legos laid side by side in staggered columns to play sharps, double sharps, triple sharps and the corresponding flats, 17 in all (plus six enharmonic keys an octave).
But it turns out that mastering 1,688 keys is not 20 times more difficult than mastering the standard 88. Mr. Hunt created a layout in which the relationship between chords and scales is consistent, no matter which key one starts from; the fingering for a chord in C major, for example, can be transferred to any other major chord.
“It’s based on research over the past century in psychoacoustics, or human pitch perception,” Mr. Hunt said. “Our ability to perceive pitch is much finer than our sense of touch or sight. It’s the finest human sensory discrimination.”
The concept of the moving chord, however, is not unique to the Tonal Plexus. Other devices that use it include the Thummer (not yet in commercial production), which, approaching the concept on a much smaller scale, has 57 keys on each half of a split-plane model and can be hand-held.
Somewhat larger are C-Thru Music’s AXiS-64 and Opal, each of which has 192 keys. Cortex Design, at www.cortex-design.com, has the Terpstra Keyboard, which is not commercially available, with 280 keys.
Bigger yet, the Chromatone CT-312 has 312 keys and resembles an unmarked typewriter. One of the truly jumbo devices in the category is the 810-key Wilson 990 Generalized Keyboard — like Mr. Hunt’s creation, it is microtonal — from Starr Labs in San Diego.
Starr Labs, at www.starrlabs.com, is also noteworthy for another of its creations, the 288-key ZBoard ($3,000), with a 12-by-24 key arrangement that looks more than anything like an array of black and white dominoes. Like the other boards, it has chord and scale shapes that are transferable to any note in the spectrum; one of the program options creates the equivalent of a double guitar neck running across the 12-deep keys, with each key down the scale serving as the equivalent of a fret.
“It’s like playing a lap steel guitar,” said Harvey Starr, president of Starr Labs. “The main difference is that on a guitar, you can only play one note at a time per string. On this keyboard, you can depress as many buttons down the ‘string’ as you can reach.”
C-Thru produces versions of its boards for $1,700, available through its Web site, www.c-thru-music.com. It calls the keyboard a “harmonic table,” and the honeycomb (or hexagonal lattice) pattern of keys allows for surprising simplicity.
Major chords are simply triangle patterns that point to the right (any two stacked keys plus the key to the right between them, which can be played with a single finger pressing down at their intersection), while minor chords are triangle patterns that point to the left. Each note has the same relationship to its keyboard neighbors as every other note.
“If you find music theory difficult to understand or you want to think of a different way to approach composition of music, it completely takes you away from how you’re used to playing and understanding,” said Jacqueline Kandalaft, C-Thru’s director. “It lays everything out in a very logical fashion.”
And when it comes to producing ethereal sounds, logic is sweet music.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
The Whistle of Death: Researchers re-create pre-Columbian sounds
AP
Researchers re-create pre-Columbian sounds
Noisemakers made of natural materials were integral part of life
By Julie Watson
The Associated Press
updated 9:18 a.m. PT, Sun., June. 29, 2008
MEXICO CITY - Scientists were fascinated by the ghostly find: a human skeleton buried in an Aztec temple with a clay, skull-shaped whistle in each bony hand.
But no one blew into the noisemakers for nearly 15 years. When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.
If death had a sound, this was it.
Roberto Velazquez believes the Aztecs played this mournful wail from the so-called Whistles of Death before they were sacrificed to the gods.
The 66-year-old mechanical engineer has devoted his career to recreating the sounds of his pre-Columbian ancestors, producing hundreds of replicas of whistles, flutes and wind instruments unearthed in Mexico’s ruins.
For years, many archaeologists who uncovered ancient noisemakers dismissed them as toys. Museums relegated them to warehouses. But while most studies and exhibits of ancient cultures focus on how they looked, Velazquez said the noisemakers provide a rare glimpse into how they sounded.
“We’ve been looking at our ancient culture as if they were deaf and mute,” he said. “But I think all of this is tied closely to what they did, how they thought.”
Velazquez is part of a growing field of study that includes archaeologists, musicians and historians. Medical doctors are interested too, believing the Aztecs may have used sound to treat illnesses.
Noisemakers made of clay, turkey feathers, sugar cane, frog skins and other natural materials were an integral part of pre-Columbian life, found at nearly every Mayan site.
The Aztecs sounded the low, foghorn hum of conch shells at the start of ceremonies and possibly during wars to communicate strategies. Hunters likely used animal-shaped ocarinas to produce throaty grunts that lured deer.
The modern-day archaeologists who came up with the term Whistles of Death believe they were meant to help the deceased journey into the underworld, while tribes are said to have emitted terrifying sounds to fend off enemies, much like high-tech crowd-control devices available today.
Experts also believe pre-Columbian tribes used some of the instruments to send the human brain into a dream state and treat certain illnesses. The ancient whistles could guide research into how rhythmic sounds alter heart rates and states of consciousness.
Among Velazquez’s replicas are those that emit a strange cacophony so strong that their frequency nears the maximum range of human hearing.
Chronicles by Spanish priests from the 1500s described the Aztec and Mayan sounds as sad and doleful, although these may have been only what was played in their presence.
“My experience is that at least some pre-Hispanic sounds are more destructive than positive, others are highly trance-evocative,” said Arnd Adje Both, an expert in pre-Hispanic music archaeology who was the first to blow the Whistles of Death found in the Aztec skeleton’s hands. “Surely, sounds were used in all kind of cults, such as sacrificial ones, but also in healing ceremonies.”
Sounds still play an important role in Mexican society. A cow bell announces the arrival of the garbage truck outside Mexico City homes. A trilling, tuneless flute heralds the knife sharpener’s arrival. A whistle emitting cat meows says the lottery ticket seller is here.
But pre-Columbian instruments often end up in a warehouse, Velazquez said, “and I’m talking about museums around the world doing this, not just here.”
That’s changing, said Tomas Barrientos, director of the archaeology department at Del Valle University of Guatemala.
“Ten years ago, nothing was known about this,” he said. “But with the opening up of museum collections and people’s private collections, it’s an area of research that is growing in importance.”
Velazquez meticulously researches each noisemaker before replicating it. He travels across Mexico to examine newly unearthed wind instruments, some dating back to 400 B.C. and shaped like animals or deities. He studies reliefs and scans 500-year-old Spanish chronicles.
But making replicas is only part of the work. Then he has to figure out how to play them. He’ll blow into some holes and plug others, or press the instrument to his lips and flutter his tongue. Sometimes he puts the noisemaker inside his mouth and blows, fluctuating the air from his lungs.
He experimented with one frog-shaped whistle for a year before discovering its inner croak.
Renowned archaeologist Paul Healy, who made an important discovery of Mayan instruments in Belize in the 1980s, said many of the originals still work.
“A couple of these instruments we found were broken, which was great because we could actually see the construction of them, the actual technology of building a sound chamber out of paper-thin clay,” he said.
Still, their exact sounds will likely remain a mystery.
“When you blow into them, you still can get notes from them, so you could figure out what the range was,” Healy said. “But what we don’t have is sheet music to give us a more accurate picture of what it sounded like.”
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Russian monastery anticipates the familiar toll of ancient bells
Christian Science Monitor
Russian monastery anticipates the familiar toll of ancient bells
After 78 years, a set of 18 iconic bells rescued from a Moscow monastery will return home.
By Amy Farnsworth | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
from the June 13, 2008 edition
Cambridge, Mass. - As the chiming of bells rang through Harvard University's campus among a field of caps and gowns last week, it was the final time they would be heard – the end of an era for the university, but also a new beginning.
For the past 78 years, the 18 bells have hung high above Harvard's buildings, chiming on Sunday afternoons and every year at commencement. This summer, the bells will return home to ring at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow from which they were rescued in 1930 at the height of the Stalinist era, at a time when antireligion campaigns sought to destroy monasteries and melt down their ironwork.
In a world where artifacts are often stolen and seldom returned, the story of the Danilov bells is rare.
It all began in 1929 when American philanthropist Charles Crane was prompted by his agent Thomas Whittemore to save the bells from destruction. He purchased them from the Soviet government, which "was apparently desperate for money and was selling off everything of value – imperial Bokhara rugs, artwork, and church property," says Luis Campos, a Harvard alumnus and history professor at Drew University in New Jersey who has been researching the bells. They were transported by train from Moscow to Leningrad, he says, and then shipped to the US.
Weighing in at 25 tons, the bells were installed in Harvard University's Lowell House residence hall and atop the Baker Library. Students embraced the art of bell ringing with the formation of the Lowell House Society of Russian Bell Ringers, later taking trips to Russia to experience the art firsthand.
"They really are the only four existing bell sets from the prerevolutionary times that weren't destroyed during the Stalinist era," says Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard and master of Lowell House.
For the Danilov Monastery, now the home of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the homecoming of the bells is a matter of spiritual significance. "[The bells] are described as singing icons – that they have voices and tongues that are singing to God as they are ringing," says Professor Campos. "There is no way to replace these bells. They are an organic set and they have their own history from the place they were hung. They were very much a part of the religious community."
Hierodeacon Roman, the chief bell ringer at the Danilov Monastery, had only seen and heard the bells on the Internet until he visited Harvard in 2004, where he had a chance to ring them for the first time. "We've been anticipating [this] for a long long time in our monastery," he said, describing the event as being of "miraculous" importance and praising Harvard's cooperation.
The first request for the return of the bells came in 2002 and picked up momentum as Harvard alumni and the monastery made a case. Last September, Harvard returned the bell from the Baker Library and replaced it with a new bell. This summer, the university will begin disassembling the other 17. A new set of bells created at a foundry in Russia will replace them – all financed by Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg.
To commemorate the bells' return to Moscow, Harvard held a two-day event last week, inviting bell-ringing alumni and members of the monastery, among others, to recount the history, cite appreciation, and hear the bells for the last time on US soil.
The exchange of the bells has led to an ongoing friendship between Harvard and the Danilov Monastery. Harvard students and faculty will visit Russia, and members of the monastery will visit Harvard to teach Russian bell-ringing classes. "It's not just about moving metal back and forth across the ocean," Campos says. "It's about forging relationships between people."
Russian monastery anticipates the familiar toll of ancient bells
After 78 years, a set of 18 iconic bells rescued from a Moscow monastery will return home.
By Amy Farnsworth | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
from the June 13, 2008 edition
Cambridge, Mass. - As the chiming of bells rang through Harvard University's campus among a field of caps and gowns last week, it was the final time they would be heard – the end of an era for the university, but also a new beginning.
For the past 78 years, the 18 bells have hung high above Harvard's buildings, chiming on Sunday afternoons and every year at commencement. This summer, the bells will return home to ring at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow from which they were rescued in 1930 at the height of the Stalinist era, at a time when antireligion campaigns sought to destroy monasteries and melt down their ironwork.
In a world where artifacts are often stolen and seldom returned, the story of the Danilov bells is rare.
It all began in 1929 when American philanthropist Charles Crane was prompted by his agent Thomas Whittemore to save the bells from destruction. He purchased them from the Soviet government, which "was apparently desperate for money and was selling off everything of value – imperial Bokhara rugs, artwork, and church property," says Luis Campos, a Harvard alumnus and history professor at Drew University in New Jersey who has been researching the bells. They were transported by train from Moscow to Leningrad, he says, and then shipped to the US.
Weighing in at 25 tons, the bells were installed in Harvard University's Lowell House residence hall and atop the Baker Library. Students embraced the art of bell ringing with the formation of the Lowell House Society of Russian Bell Ringers, later taking trips to Russia to experience the art firsthand.
"They really are the only four existing bell sets from the prerevolutionary times that weren't destroyed during the Stalinist era," says Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard and master of Lowell House.
For the Danilov Monastery, now the home of the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the homecoming of the bells is a matter of spiritual significance. "[The bells] are described as singing icons – that they have voices and tongues that are singing to God as they are ringing," says Professor Campos. "There is no way to replace these bells. They are an organic set and they have their own history from the place they were hung. They were very much a part of the religious community."
Hierodeacon Roman, the chief bell ringer at the Danilov Monastery, had only seen and heard the bells on the Internet until he visited Harvard in 2004, where he had a chance to ring them for the first time. "We've been anticipating [this] for a long long time in our monastery," he said, describing the event as being of "miraculous" importance and praising Harvard's cooperation.
The first request for the return of the bells came in 2002 and picked up momentum as Harvard alumni and the monastery made a case. Last September, Harvard returned the bell from the Baker Library and replaced it with a new bell. This summer, the university will begin disassembling the other 17. A new set of bells created at a foundry in Russia will replace them – all financed by Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg.
To commemorate the bells' return to Moscow, Harvard held a two-day event last week, inviting bell-ringing alumni and members of the monastery, among others, to recount the history, cite appreciation, and hear the bells for the last time on US soil.
The exchange of the bells has led to an ongoing friendship between Harvard and the Danilov Monastery. Harvard students and faculty will visit Russia, and members of the monastery will visit Harvard to teach Russian bell-ringing classes. "It's not just about moving metal back and forth across the ocean," Campos says. "It's about forging relationships between people."
Friday, May 30, 2008
David Byrne Uses Building as Orchestra
From the New York Times; see video at the Times' page here:
May 30, 2008
David Byrne’s New Band, With Architectural Solos
By RANDY KENNEDY
THE symphony of Manhattan Island, composed and performed fortissimo daily by garbage trucks, car speakers, I-beam bolters, bus brakes, warped manhole covers, knocking radiators, people yelling from high windows and the blaring television that now greets you in the back of a taxi, is the kind of music people would pay good money to be able to silence, if only there were a switch.
The other day, in a paint-peeling hangar of a room at the foot of the island, David Byrne, the artist and musician, placed his finger on a switch that did exactly the opposite: it made such music on purpose. The switch was a white key on the bass end of a beat-up Weaver pump organ that was practically the only thing sitting inside the old Great Hall of the Battery Maritime Building, a 99-year-old former ferry terminal at the end of Whitehall Street that has sat mostly dormant for more than a half-century.
The organ’s innards had been replaced with relays and wires and light blue air hoses. And when the key was pressed, a 110-volt motor strapped to a girder high up in the room’s ceiling began to vibrate, essentially playing the girder and producing a deafening low hum — like one of the tuba tones played by the mother ship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Or, if you were less charitably inclined, like a truck on Canal Street with a loose muffler. Mr. Byrne ran his fingers up the keyboard, causing more hums and whines, moans and plunks and clinks until he came to a key that seemed to do nothing.
“We’re not getting any register on that bottom one anymore,” he said, sending two artist-technicians up onto a scaffold to figure out why a certain magnetic knocker was not turning one of the room’s giant Corinthian columns — topped by upended, gaping dolphins — into a kind of architectural castanet.
The project Mr. Byrne has created with support from the public-art organization Creative Time is a kind of twist on the projects Creative Time has brought into being since it started helping artists use the city as a canvas in 1974. Often the organization finds dilapidated, neglected, historically rich buildings, and artists create installations inside, as the British artist Mike Nelson did last year when he turned a wing of the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side into a dimly lighted labyrinth. The ferry-terminal project, called, appropriately enough, “Playing the Building,” opens at noon on Saturday.
But in the case of Mr. Byrne — a founder of the Talking Heads who has been a visual artist as long as he has been a musician and producer — the Beaux-Arts terminal itself has become the installation, or at least a stunning, 9,000-square-foot part of it that once served as a soaring waiting room for passengers who came there to board ferries bound for South Brooklyn. The building has been one of those glorious Manhattan antiques caught in a decades-long time warp, not used for major ferry service since 1938. Plans to have it house everything from a children’s museum to a dance troupe to even Creative Time’s offices have fallen through over the years, and now a developer has been chosen to rehabilitate the terminal and build a hotel atop it.
At least for the next two and a half months, though, the building will simply serve as a gargantuan cast-iron orchestra. Besides being fitted with several motors, which produce the bass sounds by vibrating a set of girders that once supported a stained-glass skylight in the 40-foot-high ceiling, the organ is attached to a pump that blows air through a tangle of hoses. These hoses snake into the huge room’s old water and heating pipes and conduits, making primitive flute sounds. And then there are more than a dozen spring-loaded solenoids, attached like woodpeckers to the columns and even to a linebacker-size radiator that emits a surprisingly sonorous tone when struck in just the right place with a metal rod.
When you get both hands busy on the keyboard — as anyone who comes to see the work will be allowed to do — the room roars and clatters to life, seeming to harbor an invisible band playing something written by Philip Glass in collaboration with the Stooges, a Japanese sho virtuoso and a kitchen full of 3-year-olds with pots and ladles.
Working on the project recently in his SoHo studio, Mr. Byrne said he had generally avoided music-related art projects because he did not want his reputation as a musician to become confused with such work.
But when he was invited several years ago to propose a piece for Fargfabriken, a gallery space in a former factory in Stockholm, he began thinking about how to turn a building into an instrument. (One of his ideas for the Swedish project was to build a huge microwave oven inside the hall.) He had inherited the out-of-tune pump organ from a friend who was moving out of his print studio in the meatpacking district. And so Mr. Byrne used the organ to create the first version of “Playing the Building” in 2005.
Because he generally likes to distance his art from his music, Mr. Byrne has not composed pieces for the building-organ and does not plan to play it publicly. But he said he hoped the project would say something about the direction of popular music.
“I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down,” he said in a discussion about the piece with Anne Pasternak, the project’s curator and Creative Time’s president. “The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world’s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.”
The music that will soon be heard from the maritime building’s infrastructure and the organ, with assistance from a stream of visitors over the summer, is essentially “authorless,” but “strongly directed,” he said.
With only four days left before the doors opened, Mr. Byrne and two people who helped build the piece, Mark McNamara and Justin Downs, were working hard one recent afternoon to arrange the organ’s keyboard so that it played the building roughly from low notes to high — very roughly. (“Nobody’s going to be able to play Bach on it,” Mr. Byrne said.)
A white rubber mallet, useful early on for determining the lyrical quality of rusty steam pipes and girders, lay atop the organ. And even with the sun streaming through the room’s expansive skylight, there was an element of gothic ghostliness about the setup, a prim-looking church organ commanding an empty waiting room. (By way of unintentional back story, to add a little extra eeriness, in 1885 The New York Times reported that J. O. Weaver, a member of the family that owned the Weaver Organ Manufacturing Company of York, Pa., became “violently deranged” in a Dallas hotel room and committed suicide by cutting his throat “from ear to ear” with a razor.)
Mr. Byrne, wearing a straw fedora with a feather stuck in the band, seemed to grow momentarily bored with architectural harmonies and took a visitor through a doorway into a shadowy hall that led to a seemingly darker history for the building: two empty meat lockers and a tiled room with a drain that might have been an abattoir, perhaps once used for supplying meat to Governors Island, whose ferry leaves from the slips below.
“There’s some really weird stuff back here,” he said.
Then he grabbed his backpack and headed out to another appointment uptown, by means of that weirdest and most musical New York City instrument of all, the subway.
“Playing the Building” opens on Saturday at noon and will continue on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, from noon to 6 p.m., through Aug. 10 at the Battery Maritime Building, 10 South Street, Lower Manhattan; (212) 206-6674 or creativetime.org/byrne. Admission is free.
UPDATE: YOUTUBE
May 30, 2008
David Byrne’s New Band, With Architectural Solos
By RANDY KENNEDY
THE symphony of Manhattan Island, composed and performed fortissimo daily by garbage trucks, car speakers, I-beam bolters, bus brakes, warped manhole covers, knocking radiators, people yelling from high windows and the blaring television that now greets you in the back of a taxi, is the kind of music people would pay good money to be able to silence, if only there were a switch.
The other day, in a paint-peeling hangar of a room at the foot of the island, David Byrne, the artist and musician, placed his finger on a switch that did exactly the opposite: it made such music on purpose. The switch was a white key on the bass end of a beat-up Weaver pump organ that was practically the only thing sitting inside the old Great Hall of the Battery Maritime Building, a 99-year-old former ferry terminal at the end of Whitehall Street that has sat mostly dormant for more than a half-century.
The organ’s innards had been replaced with relays and wires and light blue air hoses. And when the key was pressed, a 110-volt motor strapped to a girder high up in the room’s ceiling began to vibrate, essentially playing the girder and producing a deafening low hum — like one of the tuba tones played by the mother ship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Or, if you were less charitably inclined, like a truck on Canal Street with a loose muffler. Mr. Byrne ran his fingers up the keyboard, causing more hums and whines, moans and plunks and clinks until he came to a key that seemed to do nothing.
“We’re not getting any register on that bottom one anymore,” he said, sending two artist-technicians up onto a scaffold to figure out why a certain magnetic knocker was not turning one of the room’s giant Corinthian columns — topped by upended, gaping dolphins — into a kind of architectural castanet.
The project Mr. Byrne has created with support from the public-art organization Creative Time is a kind of twist on the projects Creative Time has brought into being since it started helping artists use the city as a canvas in 1974. Often the organization finds dilapidated, neglected, historically rich buildings, and artists create installations inside, as the British artist Mike Nelson did last year when he turned a wing of the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side into a dimly lighted labyrinth. The ferry-terminal project, called, appropriately enough, “Playing the Building,” opens at noon on Saturday.
But in the case of Mr. Byrne — a founder of the Talking Heads who has been a visual artist as long as he has been a musician and producer — the Beaux-Arts terminal itself has become the installation, or at least a stunning, 9,000-square-foot part of it that once served as a soaring waiting room for passengers who came there to board ferries bound for South Brooklyn. The building has been one of those glorious Manhattan antiques caught in a decades-long time warp, not used for major ferry service since 1938. Plans to have it house everything from a children’s museum to a dance troupe to even Creative Time’s offices have fallen through over the years, and now a developer has been chosen to rehabilitate the terminal and build a hotel atop it.
At least for the next two and a half months, though, the building will simply serve as a gargantuan cast-iron orchestra. Besides being fitted with several motors, which produce the bass sounds by vibrating a set of girders that once supported a stained-glass skylight in the 40-foot-high ceiling, the organ is attached to a pump that blows air through a tangle of hoses. These hoses snake into the huge room’s old water and heating pipes and conduits, making primitive flute sounds. And then there are more than a dozen spring-loaded solenoids, attached like woodpeckers to the columns and even to a linebacker-size radiator that emits a surprisingly sonorous tone when struck in just the right place with a metal rod.
When you get both hands busy on the keyboard — as anyone who comes to see the work will be allowed to do — the room roars and clatters to life, seeming to harbor an invisible band playing something written by Philip Glass in collaboration with the Stooges, a Japanese sho virtuoso and a kitchen full of 3-year-olds with pots and ladles.
Working on the project recently in his SoHo studio, Mr. Byrne said he had generally avoided music-related art projects because he did not want his reputation as a musician to become confused with such work.
But when he was invited several years ago to propose a piece for Fargfabriken, a gallery space in a former factory in Stockholm, he began thinking about how to turn a building into an instrument. (One of his ideas for the Swedish project was to build a huge microwave oven inside the hall.) He had inherited the out-of-tune pump organ from a friend who was moving out of his print studio in the meatpacking district. And so Mr. Byrne used the organ to create the first version of “Playing the Building” in 2005.
Because he generally likes to distance his art from his music, Mr. Byrne has not composed pieces for the building-organ and does not plan to play it publicly. But he said he hoped the project would say something about the direction of popular music.
“I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down,” he said in a discussion about the piece with Anne Pasternak, the project’s curator and Creative Time’s president. “The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world’s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.”
The music that will soon be heard from the maritime building’s infrastructure and the organ, with assistance from a stream of visitors over the summer, is essentially “authorless,” but “strongly directed,” he said.
With only four days left before the doors opened, Mr. Byrne and two people who helped build the piece, Mark McNamara and Justin Downs, were working hard one recent afternoon to arrange the organ’s keyboard so that it played the building roughly from low notes to high — very roughly. (“Nobody’s going to be able to play Bach on it,” Mr. Byrne said.)
A white rubber mallet, useful early on for determining the lyrical quality of rusty steam pipes and girders, lay atop the organ. And even with the sun streaming through the room’s expansive skylight, there was an element of gothic ghostliness about the setup, a prim-looking church organ commanding an empty waiting room. (By way of unintentional back story, to add a little extra eeriness, in 1885 The New York Times reported that J. O. Weaver, a member of the family that owned the Weaver Organ Manufacturing Company of York, Pa., became “violently deranged” in a Dallas hotel room and committed suicide by cutting his throat “from ear to ear” with a razor.)
Mr. Byrne, wearing a straw fedora with a feather stuck in the band, seemed to grow momentarily bored with architectural harmonies and took a visitor through a doorway into a shadowy hall that led to a seemingly darker history for the building: two empty meat lockers and a tiled room with a drain that might have been an abattoir, perhaps once used for supplying meat to Governors Island, whose ferry leaves from the slips below.
“There’s some really weird stuff back here,” he said.
Then he grabbed his backpack and headed out to another appointment uptown, by means of that weirdest and most musical New York City instrument of all, the subway.
“Playing the Building” opens on Saturday at noon and will continue on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, from noon to 6 p.m., through Aug. 10 at the Battery Maritime Building, 10 South Street, Lower Manhattan; (212) 206-6674 or creativetime.org/byrne. Admission is free.
UPDATE: YOUTUBE
Friday, May 23, 2008
U.S. Releases Seized Iranian Dulcimers to Legendary California Music Professor
Washington DC (USA) --(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The very mention of the word ‘Iran,’ can often trigger a reflexive enforcement response by the U.S. Government. But in the case of Manoochehr Sadeghi, an internationally renowned musician and retired UCLA professor of musicology, reason prevailed, and U.S. officials allowed Professor Sadeghi to take possession of musical instruments that otherwise might have been embargoed under U.S. trade sanctions against Iran.
In August, 2007, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents seized four miniature dulcimers (called santurs in Persian) that a relative in Iran had sent to Professor Sadeghi. After considering a petition by Professor Sadeghi’s attorney, however, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) at the U.S. Department of the Treasury granted Professor Sadeghi a license to import the dulcimers and Customs finally released the instruments to Professor Sadeghi.
Professor Sadeghi was born in Iran in 1938, moved to the United States in 1964 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2001. He is a virtuoso on the santur, an Iranian stringed instrument played with two featherweight mallets. Professor Sadeghi began studying as a child in Iran, performed as a soloist with the Iranian national orchestra and has performed before foreign dignitaries including Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain and the late King Hussein of Jordan. He taught at the Conservatory of Persian Music and, after moving to the United States, became a professor of Persian classical music, theory, history and performance at UCLA. His students have included Daniel Sheehy, the Director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, and the Hon. Jimmy Delshad, the mayor of Beverly Hills, California and the highest-elected Iranian-American official in the United States.
In Los Angeles, Professor Sadeghi has performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. He has also performed in Washington, D.C. at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Freer Gallery of Art, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. He has received the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.
Professor Sadeghi uses the dulcimers to privately teach students, give concert performances, and promote greater understanding of Iranian culture and music. He plans to eventually donate the dulcimers to museums throughout the United States.
Commenting on his receipt of the license, Professor Sadeghi said, “Music transcends all political boundaries and differences. I am enormously grateful to the Treasury Department for not letting our current relations with Iran stand in the way of my receiving these wonderful instruments.”
Professor Sadeghi’s attorney, David H. Laufman, a partner at Kelley Drye & Warren, secured the release of the professor’s seized instruments after persuading OFAC to grant him a license. He stated that “It’s never easy to obtain a license to bring in goods from Iran, particularly in the current enforcement climate. OFAC is to be commended for taking a hard look at the facts and coming to an equitable resolution.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog recently profiled Laufman for his efforts.
Beverly Hills Mayor Delshad commented that “Professor Sadeghi is the world’s leading master of the Persian santur and it has been a privilege to be his pupil.”
In August, 2007, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents seized four miniature dulcimers (called santurs in Persian) that a relative in Iran had sent to Professor Sadeghi. After considering a petition by Professor Sadeghi’s attorney, however, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) at the U.S. Department of the Treasury granted Professor Sadeghi a license to import the dulcimers and Customs finally released the instruments to Professor Sadeghi.
Professor Sadeghi was born in Iran in 1938, moved to the United States in 1964 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2001. He is a virtuoso on the santur, an Iranian stringed instrument played with two featherweight mallets. Professor Sadeghi began studying as a child in Iran, performed as a soloist with the Iranian national orchestra and has performed before foreign dignitaries including Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain and the late King Hussein of Jordan. He taught at the Conservatory of Persian Music and, after moving to the United States, became a professor of Persian classical music, theory, history and performance at UCLA. His students have included Daniel Sheehy, the Director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, and the Hon. Jimmy Delshad, the mayor of Beverly Hills, California and the highest-elected Iranian-American official in the United States.
In Los Angeles, Professor Sadeghi has performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. He has also performed in Washington, D.C. at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Freer Gallery of Art, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. He has received the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.
Professor Sadeghi uses the dulcimers to privately teach students, give concert performances, and promote greater understanding of Iranian culture and music. He plans to eventually donate the dulcimers to museums throughout the United States.
Commenting on his receipt of the license, Professor Sadeghi said, “Music transcends all political boundaries and differences. I am enormously grateful to the Treasury Department for not letting our current relations with Iran stand in the way of my receiving these wonderful instruments.”
Professor Sadeghi’s attorney, David H. Laufman, a partner at Kelley Drye & Warren, secured the release of the professor’s seized instruments after persuading OFAC to grant him a license. He stated that “It’s never easy to obtain a license to bring in goods from Iran, particularly in the current enforcement climate. OFAC is to be commended for taking a hard look at the facts and coming to an equitable resolution.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog recently profiled Laufman for his efforts.
Beverly Hills Mayor Delshad commented that “Professor Sadeghi is the world’s leading master of the Persian santur and it has been a privilege to be his pupil.”
Monday, August 13, 2007
Robotic Musical Instruments
Great collection of robotic music instrument photos at Dark Roasted Blend with a link to a great Flickr set.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Human Sound Conduit from Force Theory Productions
This interesting project comes from Force Theory Productions (hat tip to Music Thing) and involves sending low level electric currents through the human body, which is then used to activate synthesizers. They call it the Human Piano.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
The Reactable
The reactable is an amazing musical instrument interface:
Bjork's tour is really raising the profile of this instrument, which unfortunately is not commercially available.
Bjork's tour is really raising the profile of this instrument, which unfortunately is not commercially available.
Monday, July 16, 2007
A Double-Keyboard Steinway Piano
NYT
July 15, 2007
Music
Let’s Play Two: Singular Piano
By JAMES BARRON
THE instrument could stump contestants on “Jeopardy!”: It has 164 keys and four pedals. Oh, and two keyboards.
The correct response is neither “What is an organ?” nor “What is a harpsichord?” No, the answer involves an almost one-of-a-kind piano from the late 1920’s, which Christopher Taylor will play this afternoon at the Caramoor International Music Festival in Katonah, N.Y. It is the only two-keyboard instrument Steinway ever made, and Mr. Taylor considers it the perfect piano for the piece he will perform there, Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.
Bach, after all, specified that the “Goldbergs” were to be played on a harpsichord with two manuals, or keyboards, a surprising command from a composer who was seldom so precise about what instruments he wanted his works played on. But Mr. Taylor does not really base his case for using this piano on historical authenticity, for the second keyboard here will not do what a second manual on an organ or a harpsichord would do.
It does not add a new sonority. The double-keyboard piano sounds like a piano, but with fuller chords and denser harmonies. Unlike an organ with additional stops and pipes or a harpsichord with separate strings for the second manual, the double-keyboard piano still has only one set of hammers and strings. And Mr. Taylor still has only 10 fingers.
But the two keyboards, one with the usual 88 notes, the other with only 76, lets him try some intriguing moves. The shorter keyboard plays notes an octave above the ones on the longer keyboard. Pressing a key on the shorter keyboard activates a mechanism inside the piano that pulls down the corresponding key on the lower keyboard, but an octave higher. So, if he keeps both hands on the upper keyboard, the lower one can look like the keyboard of a player piano, with the keys going down by themselves.
And because of the way the keyboards are laid out, one above the other, like a staircase with only two steps, he can extend his reach beyond what is possible on a conventional keyboard. He can cover a two-octave interval by playing, say, a C on the lower keyboard with his thumb and a C on the upper keyboard with his fifth finger. Other big intervals, like twelfths, are not much of a stretch either.
By filling in some notes in the middle, he can get, as he puts it, “a really massive sound, one-handed.” And with help from the fourth pedal, which functions as a coupler that makes it possible to play on the lower keyboard and have the upper keyboard play the same notes an octave higher, he can zip through fast passages with octaves by playing only single notes on one keyboard. The coupler does the rest.
Having explained all that, Mr. Taylor makes his case for playing Bach on this particular piano that has mostly to do with the visual element of the performance. He wants his “Goldbergs” to be watched as well as listened to.
“This is more like what a contemporary of Bach might have seen,” he said, “whereas the stuff that a modern concertgoer sees when the ‘Goldbergs’ are played on a typical piano is very entertaining, seeing all this tangling of the pianist’s hands. But that’s not something that Bach envisioned, and you can’t discount the importance of that visual effect. I think when you see the hands on separate manuals and see them crossing each other that way, it’s easier to perceive what the voices are.” Of course this benefits fewer than half the people in the audience: only those who can actually see the keyboards.
He got his hands on this piano in 2005. It is a tinkerer’s dream, built to specifications worked out by an obscure Hungarian composer turned inventor, Emanuel Moor. He figured out the riot of rods and platforms just behind the keyboards that looks a bit like a sluice gate in a water treatment plant. But the mechanism inside is not the only thing that is different from a conventional piano. Even the keys are different. On Moor’s lower keyboard they have “hummocks”: little cubes that rise from the back of the keys. Moor designed them to make it easier to play on both keyboards at the same time, using the same hand and playing way in, close to the end of the lower-keyboard key. The keys on the upper manual are ordinary flat ivories.
Only about 60 of Moor’s double-keyboard pianos were made, mostly by Bösendorfer. Chickering, Bechstein and others made a few. Mr. Taylor’s piano was made in Steinway’s factory in Hamburg, Germany, for the industrialist Werner von Siemens, who wanted it for a 450-seat “recital salon” he had built in Berlin.
But Moor had other fans. Alfred Cortot performed on Moor’s double-keyboard pianos, and Ravel was quoted as saying, “I am now hearing my composition for the first time as I intended it should sound.” The influential critic and editor Donald Tovey gave Moor’s design his blessing in 1922 and was still raving about it when he wrote the entry on the piano in the Encyclopedia Britannica a few years later.
Initially, every piano manufacturer in the United States and Europe rejected Moor’s double-keyboard design, saying that it would be impossible to manufacture. So Moor made a prototype on his own, with help from a carpenter or two. The major piano companies eventually made Moor’s piano, but only in very limited numbers.
That — and Moor’s widow, Winifred Christie Moor, who continued to play the two-manual pianos long after Moor’s death in 1931 — was enough to make the design popular among pianists like Gunnar Johansen, who became an artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1939. The Moor bug bit Johansen hard: he had two double-keyboard instruments, a Bösendorfer and the Steinway.
But when Mr. Taylor tried the piano in 2005, 14 years after Johansen’s death, he had to figure out which keyboard to play with which hand. This was complicated by coordination problems: the top keyboard is stiffer than the lower one.
“It took me a while to realize that the default would be to have the left hand on the upper keyboard and the right hand on the lower,” he said, “so I experimented. I wasn’t sure what was going to work. Because the upper keyboard is so much stiffer, it seemed to me it might be a good strategy to use my right hand up there. As it turns out, I do make use of that option once in Variation 20 in the ‘Goldberg’ Variations, where there’s this particularly nasty passagework in the left hand. I bring the left hand down, and to avoid tangles I take the right hand up.”
The Wisconsin piano was unusual for Steinway in that the sluice-gate mechanism was the work of an outsider, Moor. But Steinway had had a push from another of Moor’s fans, Wilhelm Backhaus, who wrote Moor in 1928 that he had talked up “the epoch-making importance” of Moor’s invention when he met a Steinway executive in Cologne.
Still, Steinway made only the one piano. Herbert A. Shead, a Moor disciple, reported in his book about Moor that Steinway had asked about making two more but Moor never answered Steinway’s letter.
Bösendorfer made more Moor pianos. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has one that was a favorite of Emanuel Winternitz, the curator of musical instruments from 1949 to 1973. J. Kenneth Moore, a student of Winternitz’s who has the job now, remembers when the Bösendorfer had pride of place in Winternitz’s office. It has since been relegated to a warehouse on the Upper East Side. “I saw where Winternitz said: ‘I don’t understand why this technology didn’t catch on. It expands the tonality of the instrument,’ ” Mr. Moore said.
The Wisconsin piano survived World War II in Europe and was then shipped to New York, where it languished at Steinway’s factory until Johansen heard about it. Then, in 2005, officials at the university called Steinway to discuss having Moor’s sluice-gate mechanism rebuilt. Eventually they sent the “action stack” — the keys and hammers, which slide out of a piano as a single unit — to Steinway’s factory in Astoria, Queens.
There it prompted the same question that dogged Moor: Why? “Everyone has enough problems with 88 keys,” said Michael Megaloudis, a manager at Steinway.
Rebuilding the piano was a challenge because Steinway had made only the one Moor piano. Any schematic drawings were presumably lost when Steinway’s Hamburg plants were bombed in World War II.
The job of figuring out how the Moor action functioned fell to Edward Carrasco, a worker at the factory in Queens. “We had to start from scratch,” he said. “When I took this thing apart, I took pictures, and I made sure I saved everything. I put the springs in plastic bags.”
Some of the springs were broken, and he could not simply reach into the parts bin. “We had to order special wire to make new springs,” he said. He also had to install custom-made pins for the keys to bounce up and down on.
Wisconsin sent the rest of the Moor piano — the long black case with the cast-iron plate, the soundboard and the strings — east a few months ago. It filled the space beside Mr. Carrasco’s workbench as he made more adjustments.
Then, in anticipation of the Caramoor concert, Mr. Taylor and the director of the music school at Wisconsin, John Wm. Schaffer, flew to New York in April to see how Mr. Carrasco was doing. Mr. Taylor plunged into the “Goldbergs” and seemed pleased.
“This piano,” he said, “is one of those ideas someone had to think of eventually.”
M&C NOTE: video available at original story site.
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